TAY Ski Reports Declining- Why?

I think some great reasons are mentioned above, along with good rationale as to why it is valuable to have the TR's archived here.

I would add that often when a report is posted, it might garner a lot of views but little or no comments (I'm guilty of not leaving comments very often too). If you post a report and get 500 views and no comments, it sort of leaves the impression that what you did wasn't very interesting to others, so why go through the effort?

Possible reasons:

+ Growth of social media
+ Overcrowding in the backcountry

There is an observable correlation between the growth of social media and overcrowding in the backcountry.  Have you tried to find a parking spot at the Colchuck Lake trailhead on any summer weekend? Tried to get a permit for the Wonderland Trial or the Enchantments? Seen the graffiti and broken windows at High Rock Lookout? Dodged scantily clad Instagramers at Artist's Point? Tried to take a photo of Snow Lake without unicorn floaties in the frame? Skiing in the backcounty is NOT this bad...yet. But I think backcountry skiers see TAY as social media and are terrified of what the future may hold. This could be why TAY'er are increasingly shy about posing TR's.

Snow Lake will never get as many skiers in the winter as it does hikers in the summer. But how many BC skiers does it really take to make our favorite places feel overcrowded? On a nice weekend in May there are moguls on Pan Face.

I treasure TAY and the community it represents. Maybe Lowell is on to something when he suggests that TAY could be the place for storytelling in the ski community, rather than trip reporting.

I think that in general more people are moving to the FB version of TAY, and also moving to just post on their FB feed, Instagram, etc.

Speaking just for myself, I have stopped posting most mid-winter trip reports due to my perception of crowding in the BC/competition for limited Route 2 Corridor parking and snow. Now I'll only post trip reports for objectives that hard to access, unlikely to see many repeats, or so popular already that I feel that I'm not making things worse (for myself). Given the evolution of light weight ski gear my threshold for "hard to access" keeps getting raised. I fully recognize that this behavior is both selfish and self serving, since I find other peoples trip reports super useful, but there it is.

Some of you may remember a William Nealy cartoon depicting the evolution of relationships between kayakers as the sport became more popular: I think his cartoon sums up my attitude towards other skiers in the BC these days.

All that said, I would hate to see TAY go away, and I love its clunky, old-school nature.

Let's get the new site software running, as demonstrated by MtnPavlas. That should help greatly, improving ease of viewing on mobile, uploading photos, and new user creation. (Right?) Who is operating the current site?

I agree with most of the comments above.

As a long time reader and contributor I miss the good old days when Jason and others posted magazine quality TRs with lots of eye candy. As a photographer I quit posting here infact because of the photo posting limits, but would still drop links here to NWHikers where I found a user friendly platform. I saw posting my own TRs as paying back some of the value I got out of the site, and still do, but over the years many of my partners complained about increasing crowds on our favorite runs and blamed my pretty pictures, so I have tapered off. Now I mostly post simple conditions reports (esp. about bad or dangerous conditions) following Silas's lead (which I greatly appreciate) to post area conditions reports with out specific run beta.

All that said, here's some pre-season eye candy of one of my favorite areas taken last week - not enough snow to ski yet.

I primarily attribute the decline to three things:

1) The increase in the number of people in the backcountry -- TAY was once absolutely requisite to keep up on conditions information, and the place felt (and still feels) like a family. It will be unfamiliar to new TAY users, but in the mid-2000s, there was a regular Spring barbecue gathering of 20-30 TAYers that comprised a significant fraction of the regular users. Following Silas' lead, I've long been vague about some destinations, but the TAY effect, where one post can impact the flow of skiers, is real.

What was once a family has become a crowd, which changes things somewhat. As TAY shrinks, though, it is returning to that network/family of long-time TAYers. I'm only one or two degrees of separation from most of the posters on this thread, and I recognize almost all of your names. TAY's architecture, and the writing of some TRs, is almost timeless -- it rests on its own foundation, something that cannot be said of most social-media communities.

2) The rise and immediacy of social media: People can now exchange information and kudos with their friends efficiently without the necessity of sharing that information with the entire state (see point #1).

3) (to a limited extent) NWAC's exhortation that people submit observations directly to NWAC. For more than a decade, TAY was *the* place on the internet to exchange conditions information. That traffic, and the ability to converse about those reports, is the lifeblood of TAY. Finding collaborative ways to cross-link TAY posts and NWAC observations that are useful for both organizations may help to mitigate this loss. Such an idea could be extended to the several local forums (NWHikers, CascadeClimbers, WTA, etc.).

The Facebook TAY is not nearly as nice a resource as the original TAY page remains. FB-TAY is unsearchable as a reference, and the format is less-thoughtful. As long as we continue to post, TAY will live. It is not an exaggeration to state that without TAY, I might have missed out on many of the most-important people and experiences in my life. I'll keep posting conditions reports to good 'ol TAY for years to come.


(JimD, that was a beautiful afternoon -- we had just reached the car below you as that light-show happened.)